The subject disclosure presents systems and methods for improved meso-dissection of biological specimens and tissue slides including importing one or more reference slides with annotations, using inter-marker registration algorithms to automatically map the annotations to an image of a milling slide, and dissecting the annotated tissue from the selected regions in the milling slide for analysis, while concurrently tracking the data and analysis using unique identifiers such as bar codes.
Legal claims defining the scope of protection, as filed with the USPTO.
1. An instrument for meso-dissection, comprising: a processor; and a memory coupled to the processor, the memory to store computer-readable instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform operations comprising: importing a reference image along with one or more reference annotations, wherein the reference image was digitized from a reference slide scanned on a whole-slide scanner and wherein the one or more reference the annotations were generated using a whole slide viewer interface coupled to the whole-slide scanner; automatically registering the one or more reference annotations onto a live capture of a tissue specimen slide to be milled; generating a milling annotation based on the one or more reference annotations; dissecting tissue from the tissue specimen slide based on the generated milling annotation to provide, a milled tissue sample; automatically associating the one or more reference annotations and the milling annotation with the milled tissue sample and with a biological specimen; and mapping the milling annotation back to the annotated reference image.
2. The instrument of claim 1 , wherein the operations further comprise importing a plurality of annotated reference images.
3. The instrument of claim 2 , wherein the milling annotation is generated based on any combination of a plurality of annotations corresponding to the plurality of annotated reference images.
4. The instrument of claim 1 , wherein registering comprises using an inter-marker registration when the reference slide is stained differently from the tissue specimen slide.
5. The instrument of claim 1 , wherein registering comprises using a same-marker registration when the reference slide is either stained with the same stain as the tissue specimen slide, or when the reference slide is used as the tissue specimen slide.
6. The instrument of claim 1 , wherein the one or more annotations comprise one or more combinations of any geometrical representation depicting one or more regions of interest.
7. The instrument of claim 1 , wherein the reference image is of a different resolution than the live capture.
8. The instrument of claim 1 , wherein the associating comprises using a unique identifier at the specimen level and additionally for each tissue slide.
9. The instrument of claim 1 , wherein the operations further comprise providing a user interface to invoke automated registration algorithms, logical manipulation of annotations and adjust the registration of the one or more annotations on the live image.
10. A tangible non-transitory computer-readable medium to store computer-readable code that is executed by a processor to perform operations comprising: generating a milling annotation for milling a tissue specimen based on a plurality of reference annotations; and milling the tissue specimen using the milling annotation, wherein the milling annotation is generated using an automated intermarker registration algorithm, and wherein the automated intermaker registration algorithm registers an annotation within a whole slide image generated on an external whole-slide scanner on to a live capture of the tissue specimen.
11. The tangible non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 10 , wherein the operations further comprise automatically associating the one or more annotations with the milled tissue sample and with a biological specimen.
12. The computer-implemented method of claim 10 , wherein the milling tissue is stained differently than the whole slide image.
13. A computer-implemented method for meso-dissection comprising the steps: generating a milling annotation for milling a tissue specimen based on a plurality of reference annotations; and milling the tissue specimen using the milling annotation, wherein the milling annotation is generated using an automated line-based registration algorithm, and wherein the automated line-based registration algorithm registers an annotation within a whole slide image generated on an external whole-slide scanner on to a live capture of the tissue specimen.
14. The computer-implemented method of claim 13 , wherein the operations further comprise automatically associating the one or more annotations with the milled tissue sample and with a biological specimen.
15. The computer-implemented method of claim 13 , wherein the line-based registration comprises modeling boundary regions of the tissue specimens with line segments, then matching sets of the line segments between the tissue specimens.
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July 28, 2017
December 22, 2020
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